History

The Latin letter 'E' differs little from its source, the Greek letter epsilon, 'Ε'. This in turn comes from the Semitic letter hê, which has been suggested to have started as a praying or calling human figure (hillul 'jubilation'), and was most likely based on a similar Egyptian hieroglyph that indicated a different pronunciation. In Semitic, the letter represented (and in foreign words); in Greek, hê became the letter epsilon, used to represent . The various forms of the Old Italic script and the Latin alphabet followed this usage.

Use in writing systems

English

Although Middle English spelling used to represent long and short , the Great Vowel Shift changed long (as in 'me' or 'bee') to while short (as in 'met' or 'bed') remained a mid vowel. In other cases, the letter is silent, generally at the end of words.

Other languages

In the orthography of many languages it represents either , , , or some variation (such as a nasalized version) of these sounds, often with diacritics (as: ) to indicate contrasts. Less commonly, as in French, German, or Saanich, represents a mid-central vowel . Digraphs with are common to indicate either diphthongs or monophthongs, such as or for or in English, for in German, and for in French or in German.

Other systems

Most common letter

'E' is the most common (or highest-frequency) letter in the English language alphabet (starting off the typographer's phrase ETAOIN SHRDLU) and several other European languages, which has implications in both cryptography and data compression. In the story "The Gold-Bug" by Edgar Allan Poe, a character figures out a random character code by remembering that the most used letter in English is E. This makes it a hard and popular letter to use when writing lipograms. Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby (1939) is considered a "dreadful" novel, and supposedly "at least part of Wright's narrative issues were caused by language limitations imposed by the lack of E." Both Georges Perec's novel A Void (La Disparition) (1969) and its English translation by Gilbert Adair omit 'e' and are considered better works.